Careful what you wish for

“Careful what you wish for” is a popular adage that has gradually grown into a cliché. Football club owners tell it to irate supporters during an unproductive season, women and men scream it at each other even before divorce proceedings start, and politic

On the local political front, perhaps the loudest and longest display of this unsolicited piece of advice took place after the 1998 general election when the then ruling Labour Party was sent back into Opposition limbo as a result of the internal strife that had occurred during its stunted two-year sojourn in power. From there it went on to lose two other consecutive general elections, the obvious victim of that same smouldering inhouse discord.

In our bipartite conditions, it was obvious the newly elected Nationalist Party would exploit the situation and project the image of stability and unity as opposed to the confusion and dissenting voices from the other camp. Many of us have lived through that and seen it occurring with almost monotonous regularity. When Labour’s warring factions finally buried the hatchet and, in 2013, presented a united front under Joseph Muscat, tables were turned in a dramatic manner – it won by a historic majority.

People find it hard to trust a divided party, to the point of even severely denying it victory by less than a single electoral district’s quota as had happened in 2008.

Things have since turned volte-face, with the Nationalists now facing the threat of what would possibly be the worst party split in its 138-year-old history. Parties will always have to undergo these sporadic tests at some stage, especially when there is a much-needed, much-felt desire for a changing of the guard, as the annals of Maltese politics show. Perhaps the more significant of these splits occurred in 1949 when Dom Mintoff took over the Labour leadership from Pawlu Boffa and in 1962 when both major parties had to endure splits prior to a Church-subjugated general election.

The conclusions of the Aaron Bugeja inquiry into the Egrant account affair, published last Sunday after a 15-month wait that held the nation on a knife’s edge, have quickly stepped up the rhythm of internal dissent which had already spread rapidly within the Nationalist Party after two consecutive electoral defeats, both by a massive margin. That a former party leader has been exposed as having run an electoral campaign based solely on confirmed lies and falsified documents were, understandably, too much for the new PN administration to stomach. But did it jump the gun when it asked Simon Busuttil to give up his party membership and stripped him of the instantly ironic title of Shadow Minister on Governance? Hardly.

The whiplash from those decisions is now being interpreted by many as the obvious signs of a new party split. The PN has, for the past year and two months, been speaking in stereo as both the current party leader and the former loser pretended they were speaking for the party faithful. The truth is that the party rank and file had had enough of the Busuttil caravan of hardliners daily dipping their pens into pots of electronic venom, and opted to force a leadership change through a democratic vote. From then on, it has seemed like an undeclared civil war that is now out there in the open, desperately waiting for someone to come up with an impossible compromise.

Political pundits of whichever colour and hue, however, need to be aware there is no glee in watching this pitiful battle unfolding. It is harmful to both the party caught in this spiralling power struggle and the country as a whole, which needs stability on the Opposition flank too. The PN’s “careful what you wish for” tactic has been derided in various ways over re-

I have to admit I found the war of words between Italy and France over the Louvre Museum’s tweet showing a doctored image of the Mona Lisa wearing the top of the World Cup-winning French national team, as hilariously amusing. The tweet somehow infuriated many Italians who, either because of their lack of a sense of humour or caught as they are in Matteo Salvini mode, objected to the “Frenchification” of the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.

What was so obviously meant as a joke only hours after France’s World Cup victory was deemed “unforgivable” and the Louvre perpetrators described as “ignoramuses” who should hide in shame.

I did not know it, but it seems that Italy, so rich in its artistic and cultural heritage, regularly petitions for the return of the painting, valued at €604 million in 2017, which has been on permanent display in the Paris museum since 1797. American actor George Clooney had also typically trudged into the whole issue four years ago when he was quoted as saying that France should return the Mona Lisa to Italy where, ha-ha, he now lives. He received a lot of cultural bacetti.

Then came another tweet from the Louvre, this time on a serious note, saying: “For information, the Mona Lisa was sold by Leonardo da Vinci to King Francis I of France.“

The story quickly takes you to the on-going issue of a country’s national treasures on display in another’s museums. Were the diplomatic world to suddenly go crazy and nations start returning stolen, bought and hideously removed artistic objects to their places of origin, museums will start being emptied for others to be filled. I can see the Cairo and Athens museums doubling their sizes and the British Museum, for example, ending up with a lot of empty space. The same goes for many other museums in former imperial nations, not least the United States where the might of the dollar has always worked wonderfully against the spirit of art everywhere.

And to know that last year we actually had La Valette’s ceremonial dagger on loan from the Louvre, where it has been on display since it was borrowed/removed/nicked by Napoleon’s boys in blue, and not kept it, makes one think... and smile. Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, of course.